Bilateral Aerial Tele-Manipulation: Single and Multi-Robot Approaches

This Thesis focuses on bilateral aerial tele-manipulation and studies the aerial manipula- tion with Multi-Rotor Aerial Robots (MRAR). Differently from other approaches that are considering an arm and a hand mounted on an aerial vehicle, we propose lightweight passive arms that are installed on the vehicle either rigidly or through multi-degrees of freedom joints. The manipulation capability for the arm is provided by the motion of the MRAR. Using this lightweight passive arms allows to utilize the power of small size MRARs more for manipulation purposes rather than tolerating the weight of the arm. The MRAR equipped with the lightweight passive arm can perform force tracking tasks simply, i.e., can apply desired force vectors to the objects in environment. Then, more complex tasks are possible by utilizing a team of MRARs, in which each robot plays the role of a finger, making the flying hand dexterous to perform manipulation tasks. In order to cope with unknown, unstructured environment tele-operation approach is chosen. Moreover, to enhance the situational awareness of the user from remote side, bilateral teleoperation approach is used in which the human operator is provided with haptic feedback in the force form. This Thesis is organized to follow the same structure used in the described research: i) theory, ii) simulation, and iii) experiments.